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Forget About It!: The Science and Psychology of Memory

The mind works in obscure, often inconvenient, ways. Do you find you can recall every line of Wayne’s World dialogue, but you’ve forgotten your own blood type, your seven times tables, your grandmother’s maiden name, the year of the Battle of Hastings?

What do our minds retain, what do they discard, and why? Diving deep into the subconscious for this discussion, we’ll explore the latest in psychology and neuroscience to gain some novel perspectives around forgetting. Is memory loss a natural part of ageing? When is forgetting a brain malfunction, and when it is a healthy, cleansing act of the subconscious? Can forgetting be as valuable as remembering? Can forgetting spur creativity?

Join us for a fresh and memorable conversation on the psychological, scientific and even psychoanalytical processes of forgetting.

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Who?

Leah Kaminsky, physician and award-winning writer, is Poetry & Fiction Editor at the Medical Journal of Australia. Her debut novel is The Waiting Room won the Voss Literary Prize for the best novel of 2016. We’re all Going to Die has been described as ‘a joyful book about death’. She edited Writer MD and co-authored Cracking the Code. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Professor Ashley Bush is a practising psychiatrist and an NHMRC Australia Fellow, and co-director of Biomarker Discovery for the Australian Imaging Biomarker and Lifestyle Flagship Study of Ageing. He holds an academic appointment at Massachusetts General Hospital and is the recipient of numerous awards including the Potamkin Prize for Alzheimer's research. He is also Director of the Oxidation Biology Unit at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health in Melbourne.

He discovered the importance of metals in degenerative disease, particularly in Alzheimer's and he is actively working to develop new and improved disease-modifying drugs as well as drug tests to help diagnose and monitor disease progression.

He is the recipient of the Victoria Prize for Science and Innovation for his body of work on translational neuroscience.

Dr Jee Hyun Kim is a behavioral neuroscientist, whose work focuses on emotional learning and memory during childhood and adolescence. She is a Senior Research Fellow and head of the Developmental Psychobiology Laboratory at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health in Melbourne.

He is a founding member of the Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis and of the International School of Psychoanalysis of the Forums of the Lacanian Field, and is currently the coordinator of the Institute for Training of the Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis, where he teaches.

He has been in charge of the Master of Psychoanalysis programme at Victoria University, and was a senior lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry, Monash University. He was trained in psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires, Paris and Melbourne. He is the author ofPsychoanalysis with Children (Free Association Books, 1999) and numerous book chapters and articles in different languages on psychoanalytic theory and practice.